Welcome to another
learning day with Glossika.
Hello, everyone.
I'm Noah and I'll be your teacher today.
I've been learning Mandarin
for about ten years now,
and today I'm going to give you guys
a few tips and tricks
that will have you on track
to learning a new language quickly.
So, what started was
I actually took a trip to Hong Kong
to meet up with my sister,
who is living there
at the time, teaching English
and while I was there,
I noticed all of these
Chinese characters around
which I had never seen before.
And I was really curious about what
these meant,
because in English we just use letters
for all of our writing.
And then in Chinese
there's all of these
different characters.
So I asked my sister,
Well, what are these mean?
Is there pronunciation?
Do they have meaning? What's the history?
And she told me that, well,
she didn't know.
She thought
that at the time learning
Cantonese was too difficult.
So then I asked her more about that,
and I decided that, you know,
I wanted to prove to her
that I could learn this language as well.
So, I went back to America
and asked
if I could start learning Cantonese.
My department at my university
told me, we're sorry,
we don't have this class,
but, we have a Mandarin Chinese class
you could consider taking.
So that was
what got me started on this journey
to learning Mandarin Chinese.
What I found
when I started learning
the language is
everyone will have different reasons
for learning.
So, it's really important to set your goal
right at the beginning.
Maybe you're learning a language
for an upcoming trip or something
or maybe you have the goal of becoming
professionally fluent in the language.
So, your goal with learning
a language will actually help
determine your study methods,
which I think that's why
it's important to dive a little deeper
to understand the motivations
and how they can affect
the learning process.
This is
what was especially important for me
when I started learning too.
With Chinese there are many different challenges
that a new learner of Chinese will find.
Most of the common
challenges are related to
maybe the characters.
You know,
especially for an English speaker.
In English, there's what, 26 letters?
And then in Chinese
you have thousands of characters.
So if you're a new learner,
it actually looks pretty intimidating
when you see all of this.
It's like, how could I ever learn this, right?
So, besides the characters, that's not
all right.
There's the tones,
there's four tones
that's something that's
especially difficult for new learners
of Mandarin Chinese,
because there's four tones,
And if you get these tones wrong,
when you're speaking,
people will not understand you,
which is something very surprising for me
as an English speaker.
If I say
everyone will understand
that I said, what?
But if I say,
that means your mom and ma means horse.
means horse.
And if you get those wrong,
you might offend someone potentially
so when we started learning,
our teacher
taught us a word like
which means to like.
So I was in class,
I was like, oh, I can say that.
my teacher said, that's not right.
And I'm thinking, of course it's right.
I said
No, it's
Yeah, that's what I said.
so as you can see from that,
that is something very difficult
with Chinese
trying to get
this pronunciation system down
and it's something
that can really demotivate
a lot of people to where they think
maybe I'll never be able
to learn this language.
And I just like to say that
that's not true.
It, it will come in time
as you, as you are
practicing this language
and practicing this
new type of pronunciation,
your brain will slowly start
absorbing it and understand
better how to pronounce this
and within no time at all
you'll find that you're actually saying
these words properly,
which is what I found, too.
After maybe studying for
even less than a year, after
just a few months,
I notice some of those basic words
like
I was actually pronouncing
these and
my teacher was understanding me.
I think a really good tip
for a beginner
is to have a good motivation
and understand
why you're
wanting to learn this language,
because that will affect
how how well you will progress
on the learning process.
I'll give an example
when when I was a student
in my first year college class,
a lot of people in that class were in it
because the school had a requirement
to study a language.
So they took this language
as kind of like,
This is something I need to pass.
It's a class.
I just need that grade.
And obviously,
you need to pass your classes, right?
That it's not a terrible motivation
however, I still think
it's not the best motivation
if you're trying
to become fluent in a language.
So, first of all,
the school
language curriculums,
they're focusing
on memorizing information for a test.
And so if
you're just preparing for these tests
and that's not necessarily
preparing you
for an actual environment
when you're speaking with native speakers
or maybe your friends
that also speak Chinese.
When I studied at the college,
we spent most of our time
memorizing vocabulary
and preparing for a fill
in the blank exams,
which honestly, a fill in the blank test
won't really help you learn a language.
I think a better way
is to find opportunities
to improve your speaking
and listening ability
and starting
to really use the language to communicate
and think.
I think my advice would be
if you're starting to learn Chinese,
start right away, start speaking
right away,
any opportunity you can,
even if you're in your class
and you learn a word like
which means to eat,
you can use that right away.
And I know
some people will say, well,
I can't because I don't live in Taiwan
or I don't live somewhere.
And were with Chinese speakers
and I'd like to say it,
it doesn't matter.
You can still use it with your friends
who don't speak Chinese.
You can go out to the cafeteria
at your school
and your country,
and you can still say
because that's what you're doing,
you're eating, and the people around
you will be interested in like,
oh, you're learning Chinese.
That's awesome.
We want to learn Chinese, too.
And that's what I did
all the time when I was first learning.
And yeah,
I didn't have like Chinese friends,
but I was still improving
and practicing with the environment
I was given.
So, when I first started
learning Mandarin,
a very difficult part for me
was learning the grammar.
And it seems
very counterintuitive
for a lot of learners
because one of the common ideas is that
Mandarin grammar is easy,
and that's because Mandarin
doesn't have tense,
which means
when you want to talk about the past
or the future,
you don't have to change a verb
like you have to do in English,
which obviously is
something very difficult
for learners of English too.
And so when you learn Mandarin,
it's like,
Oh, it's just the same verb
for everything.
You don't need
to actually have these changes here.
It's a lot easier.
But, actually that's something
I found to be very difficult,
because if there's no tense
in the language,
then you still need to find a way
to talk about the past.
And if you don't know how to do that,
then you're not going to be able
to fully express
what you're trying to say to
a native speaker of Mandarin.
So, which is why I found the grammar
to be extremely difficult,
because I wanted to learn
how to say these things.
I had to learn about something
called particles
that you add
to the different parts of the sentence.
And these particles are how you express
if actions
have maybe haven't started yet,
an action has been completed.
And for me,
that was a completely different way
of understanding how a language works
and how to how to express meaning.
So, for instance, in Chinese,
there's a very common particle called
that you usually use
to determine
if an action has been completed or not.
I think it took me
maybe three years of learning Mandarin
before I really understood
intuitively
what
was
and how I could actually use it
fluently in a sentence.
I know it seems that
three years is a very long time, but
this is what I'm saying is
don't lose motivation over that fact.
Learning Chinese is a long journey,
and it's okay that these things take time.
Don't let it bother you.
For me,
I learned
and I didn't know what it meant
at the beginning.
I knew what the textbook said
like,
means
an action has been completed,
but I still couldn't
really use it in a sentence
which and that was okay.
I just tried to use it
over and over in time
and had friends or teachers
correct me when I was wrong.
And eventually my brain
started to pick up intuitively
what was actually going on
and how to use this properly.
So, all it took was time,
and I was willing to give myself
that time to learn and not be
and not
be demotivated over
the fact that it would take time.
So, I hit a learning plateau for Mandarin
after studying for about three years,
and at that time I was living in Taiwan
and you know, I've been studying
for three years previously.
So, at that time, going from a beginner
to an intermediate level,
obviously I was improving every day.
There were
there was just so much to learn
when you start from zero.
And then after a few years,
I got to a point where
I was still putting
in the time to study every day
and also speak with my friends
and I just didn't
see how I was improving.
I just wasn't improving at that point.
And honestly, at that time I was
I was really upset with myself.
I was thinking, well, why aren't
why am I not improving?
I improved so much before
I might be doing something wrong.
I started doing some research
and I didn't learn that
there is this idea of an intermediate plateau,
which is saying that
you're going up to this point
and then you get to a point
where you just kind of stop
and it told you, don't don't worry,
this happens to everyone.
You just need to keep practicing
and eventually
you'll get over that plateau
and even though you don't feel
like you're improving every day,
you're still improving.
So, I took that to heart,
and at that time I decided
I needed some new motivation
for studying Mandarin.
So, I joined the frisbee team in Tainan,
and I was playing frisbee
with all locals.
And I realized
when I started playing with them,
that I knew how to play frisbee,
but, I had no idea
what they were talking about,
which obviously was very intimidating.
But it was a very good thing for me.
Because it was a level of Chinese
that I had never experienced before.
So, I just like to say before I go,
I know I talked a lot today about
you know,
not giving up when you hit
certain stumbles
or hardships in your language
learning journey.
But, also I think something
that's very important
is that as you're learning Mandarin,
enjoy the process
and that will help you learn better.
You know, one thing
one of my first Chinese
teachers told me was
which means that, you know,
being interested in something
and having this passion for
it is the best teacher you can have.
My recommendation
for any aspiring Mandarin learner
or anyone already learning Mandarin
out there is, you know, be interested
in it, be passionate about it,
and then you can do anything.
So, good luck
and I hope to have the opportunity
to speak Mandarin with you someday.
Good bye.